


but not until that creature's in the pound

by Koeji



Series: Troublemaker Doppelgänger [2]
Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Alcohol, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, past The Boss/EVA, where is the Big Mama/Raiden friendship content we deserve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-06
Updated: 2017-10-06
Packaged: 2019-01-09 20:45:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12284097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Koeji/pseuds/Koeji
Summary: There is an even greater fiendishness, she thinks, in leaving his head atop this malformed body. It speaks not to what they have taken, but what they have allowed to remain.





	but not until that creature's in the pound

**Author's Note:**

> I conceived of this fic back in March and managed to actually write it by October, that's some kind of record for me.
> 
> As usual, I've taken a few timeline/headcanon liberties with this, since we have so little information about Raiden during the time he was working with Big Mama. This fic assumes that Raiden retrieved Sunny first, then worked with Big Mama and the PLA to retrieve Big Boss, in the process being captured and turned into a cyborg. And I took some inspiration from the original Metal Gear Rising concepts--specifically, that the cyborg body Raiden had in MGS4 was not the one that the Patriots originally gave him.
> 
> Also, this is a spiritual successor to my previous fic, "one of these nights I'll sleep with the windows down"--it's probably understandable without reading that one first, but I meant them to be read as a pair, so if you want to, go give that a read first!!
> 
> Title taken, once again, from a line in Lucy Dacus's "Troublemaker Doppelgänger." "One of these nights, I'll sleep with the windows down/But not until that creature's in the pound."
> 
> Please enjoy. o/ I had fun giving everyone the Big Mama & Raiden relationship we always deserved.

* * *

 

“A woman, a garbage creation, an assembly of parts. When I drink I see her rising like bats out of deep caverns, a gossamer woman—all black edges, with a chrome uterus and molded glass fingers, plastic wire rib cage and red unblinking eyes. My mama, my grandmother, my aunts, my sister, and me—every part of us that can be taken has been.

“Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood,” my mama sang for me once, and laughing added, “But we don’t need as much of it as we used to, huh?””

-Dorothy Allison, _Mama_

* * *

 

The Paradise Lost Army returns two bodies to the woman who was once called EVA.  
  
The first is a man from her past. He is a man she has to rebuild--Adam and Eve in reverse, except she has no ribs left to give. The woman who was called EVA is old now, and each morning she counts each bone in her body to see she has not given any more of herself away, and that none have been taken from her. When she rebuilds men now, she makes her materials from love. It is a different kind of love from the kind she used to undo them in her youth.

The Army brings her a second body—one snatched from the Patriots’ captivity. They’d gone back for this one, wrested what they could from those men’s clutches, and as the Army fled they hoped they’d gotten all of it. Amid the chaos of form and destruction, they could not be sure.  
  
"You should put him out of his misery," Dr. Madnar says. Over the mass of stretched fiber sinew and canals and channels of wire and steel, the doctor is their only god, but not even a doctor can begin to make sense of the half-formed man on the bed. Above the three of them, a clear plastic bag heavy with white fluid empties itself in staccato drips. "He'll never be able to live a normal life after this."

The frame quivers with the force of breath. The woman sees in the second body a kind of love that undoes all it touches—a love in gross facsimile only. In some ways, she knows it better than the genuine article. This is how she knows what has been done to the body.  
  
"I'm surprised to hear such cruelty from you, Doctor," the woman who was called EVA replies. "If someone had told me that when I was born young and pretty, I might have believed them."  
  
Dr. Madnar bristles with things understood. "I only mean that there are very few people in this world who can provide the same level of care and…discretion, that I can. One misstep and he's done for. Especially if he intends to continue to live on the battlefield."  
  
Below them, the shell does not breathe. It lies and waits for something it cannot see.  
  
"I'm not trying to punish him. What they've done here is...beyond reprehensible," the doctor says. "I'm only speaking practically. I'm thinking of his future. The world of men won't be kind to him."  
  
The woman who was called EVA looks down at the body. She looks to the face they left--smooth skin, long eyelashes, the effeminate, hinting curve of the jaw quickly disappearing into a dark twist of steel. The mass of blond hair splayed beneath him, grown far longer than his years should have allowed as if to make a statement of itself. The woman recalls days of barbarism, beheadings; warriors returned to their kings with the heads of their slain enemies to prove their deaths, hoisted up against the sun, fistfuls of hair suspending them.  
  
There is an even greater fiendishness, she thinks, in leaving his head atop this malformed body. It speaks not to what they have taken, but what they have allowed to remain.  
  
"The world of men isn't kind to the best of us," she says.

 

* * *

 

 She had once fancied herself as Judith, and that man her Holofernes. He was the last of a long line of such generals who had welcomed her into their beds, but it was only in his presence that she understood that the others had been but prototypes of Holofernes himself.  
  
She'd long loved the name Holofernes; she never knew what it meant, but it sounded like inferno on her tongue, and this made sense to her when she saw him depicted on canvas with a torrent of blood spouting from his neck. Certain kinds of men are born to catch fire at the hands of women. She'd thought of this every time she smelled her own skin burning under his hands and she turned herself inside out for him.  
  
The Boss wasn't there to catch the head of Holofernes when he fell, or scatter his ashes when he burned; at the time, she was waiting for death in a field far away. But she had been there when the woman who was once called EVA was but a nameless girl, seventeen years old and too eager for all the world’s things. There had been a deer and a small place in the forest that felt warm and safe, like The Boss’s body beside hers. The Boss had taught her how to love and be loved, to survive as a woman on the battlefield that had been made for her. It was through The Boss that she had first learned of the reconnaissance of women’s bodies beyond the realm of men--how their union was a survival tactic, born of equal parts necessity and desire. Necessity is the mother of invention, they say; necessity is a mother, overturning soil in the dead of night.

Men had left their marks on her, year after year--but each time, she recalled a place in the woods where she had traced The Boss’s snakelike scar. In her old age, she looks in the mirror at faded banks of burn marks on her hips where the lightning grabbed her, spreading like river deltas down her thighs, and she recalls the year 1964, when The Boss sucked Volgin out of her like venom from a wound. This, too, was a survival tactic.

Now she looks upon a boy called lightning. Blonde, like the two of them were. The woman who was once called EVA knows what has been done to him because it has been done to her. His body of carbon and steel is deceptively pure in form and function; it is unscarred and unscathed, and all its future scars can be repaired. But it is a void, standing in the place of flesh without replacing it. It announces the disappearance of the form it abandoned. It’s incapable of scars because it is one itself.

She has imagined it, once or twice--how it must have looked. Men’s hands on his young flesh under laboratory lights. He would’ve been blinded, had he been able to open his eyes. She wonders if he could feel it, hear it. She can hear it, feel it, same as the times when she couldn’t see it. She knows what these men looked like as they took him apart. She knows it so well that she can’t stand to think about it.

She sits by the bedside of the boy called lightning--Raiden--and thinks about how wasn’t there to stop them. She wasn’t there before--to teach him how it would be, possessing the kind of beauty that men sought to crush, and what revenge could be found in survival, in softness.

Funny, how she had traded one Jack’s body for another. In the night, she convinces herself that she knew, and sent him anyway.

In the night, she feels as if The Boss had never touched her.

 

* * *

 

He’d come to her asking for a girl. The daughter of a woman named Olga Gurlukovich, taken by the Patriots.

In the privacy of her room, the woman who was once called EVA laughed out loud. They’d all thought they were so different from their predecessors—from the Philosophers. But here they were, still holding women’s children for ransom. This was the state the organization built to fulfill The Boss’s will.

How hysterical.

But Raiden had agreed to her terms all too readily: she and the rest of the Paradise Lost Army would help him find Olga Gurlukovich’s daughter if he aided them in the retrieval of Big Boss’s body. He’d agreed to it with a recklessness that alarmed her.

But she’d quieted the alarms. This was a golden opportunity. Her children were insurgents, rebels, hot-blooded and war-hungry; for better or worse, they weren’t true soldiers. They weren’t equipped to confront a Patriot stronghold on their own. They needed Raiden on their side.

They found the girl; like a penny dreadful orphan, Raiden dropped her at the doorstep of David and his partner. Then they’d turned their attention, as the world always did, to Big Boss. They plotted their routes together, Raiden taking the lead, the PLA providing near and distant support. For the first time in a long time, the woman felt the warmth of promise. The night before their departure, she greeted Raiden in his room with an old bottle of red wine.

“It’s a tradition,” she told him. “For good luck. I can’t usually do it with the rest of the boys, though; there’s always one or two who take it too far and ruin it for the rest of us.”

She saw his eyes widen as he took a glass from her. “I-I probably shouldn’t.”

“I’m not telling you to get plastered.” Taking a seat beside him, she filled her own glass and tipped the bottle over his. “It’s a communion between friends. We are in a church, after all.”

She hadn’t expected that argument to work, but Raiden seemed to take it all too seriously as he brought the glass to his lips with the fear of God in his heart. “You’re a strange woman,” he said.

“What, for this? Come now, comrades sharing a drink on the eve of battle is a tradition much older than me. Trust me, there are far stranger parts of me you’ve yet to see.”

“I meant it in a good way. It’s…comforting.” Red wine swirled in his glass as he brought it up to the light. “This isn’t poisoned, is it?”

“Oh, Raiden,” the woman said with a laugh, “I only poison the men I love. Cheers.”

 

* * *

 

 Raiden doesn’t truly wake for days. The closest he comes is during Dr. Madnar’s visits; on those occasions, as his body is examined, prodded, and liters of white blood flushed and flooded, he lies inert. He opens his eyes toward the ceiling, wide and round and blue and utterly devoid. The woman who was once called EVA wonders if his eyes, at least, are still his, or if the Patriots had plucked those from his skull too. The first few times she sees them, she can’t meet his eyes with her own; something about them makes her muscles tighten, sends a jolt of panic through her blood. She can’t help but think that she is woefully unprepared for what it will take to deal with eyes like those. She’ll do it wrong, she thinks, and neither of them will ever recover from it. She calls the emotion inside them both _fear._

As long as Raiden’s eyes open, Dr. Madnar doesn’t complain about keeping him alive. At the woman’s insistence, research is being done on how to keep him that way--how to change this malformed body into one that a soul can inhabit. He can _live_ in this one, yes, but not truly. It’s unstable, uninspired--a frightening, messy meeting of intention and disregard. This spot of hope is the least she can give him. But case studies of cyborgization are few and far between; in any case, it will be an uneven recovery. “At least he opens his eyes,” they say, as if they are not at all terrified.

The woman tries to talk to him. “Will you look at me?” she asks, softly, to soothe her own soul. But Raiden doesn’t look back. All she sees is her own selfishness in asking. She sits beside him and looks up at the same stone vaulted ceiling that he does, as if they are two distant souls gazing up at the same moon. She feels the old church’s centuries of silence slither down her throat.

Raiden isn’t like her. She was raised to bear the violations of her body with grace and indifference and even joy, when it was required of her. Poison grew inside of her, proliferated through her veins, without her notice, until a woman taught her how to cast it out. The boy called lightning is too deep in poison, so filled with foreign blood thick and white that he cannot even know if he is man or boy or woman or girl or that he must cast it out himself. This is not a body she can touch or break bread with.

No, Raiden is not like her, she thinks; he is not like her, and he is not her equal, not a second pawn on the same chessboard. His is a generation she has already passed from; she’s a reservoir now. A figurehead.

 _A mother,_ she thinks.

 

* * *

 

 “You have beautiful hair,” the woman said, twisting a white-gold lock between her fingers. “Natural blond, too. Makes me jealous.”

The hair slipped through her fingers; Raiden suddenly seemed much smaller, shrinking from her touch, throat stuffed with stifled thoughts. She first saw it in him then: kinship beyond the angles of his eyes and the slight way he carried himself, the nervous way he looked into his wine. Some misfortunes are too particular to pass up even a man like Raiden. She, too, was well-acquainted with such particular misfortunes.

She’d been foolish not to see it sooner—more foolish still to touch him so freely. She drew her hand back to her body, feeling tight with melancholy. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I should have asked.”

“’s alright,” whispered the shape on the other end of the bed.

A hand rather distant from her own reached for the bottle, remembered once again that it was empty, and set it down with a sigh. “Not the sort to talk about it even with half a bottle of wine in your system, are you?”

Raiden shook his head. Each part of him seemed to be growing smaller before her eyes—as if a ghostly hand was pulling at his heart, gathering it like a wrinkled bedsheet. If one pulled it out quickly enough, the glasses atop the table would stay in place, unbroken, but this slow recession meant they would fall one by one with nothing to catch them, or he would look for someone to tear it all apart at once. Men like him held a dangerous balance inside themselves.

“They pick you apart,” she said. “Like buzzards. Don’t they?”

Blinking, Raiden tipped the last of his drink into his mouth. His tongue tried to speak—faltered, waved uselessly inside his mouth before the words came to it, and he looked down deeply into the floor. “Not too long ago, I was drinking a lot. Drinking too much. Sometimes I would get real dizzy, and the room felt smaller—everyone was…a lot closer. And larger. I felt them…all around me.”

“Bodies,” said the woman with reverence.

“Bodies.” Raiden nodded. “…I’m not a fun drinking partner.”

The woman shook her head. “Don’t worry about that, sweetheart. This one was my fault.” She sat her glass aside and patted the empty space on the bed beside her. Some part of her knew how to do this. “Sit closer to me, at least? Promise I won’t touch you again.”

Raiden moved to sit beside her. She could feel his breath rising and falling against her, and she curled her fingers around the neck of the bottle, swinging its weight to and fro and thinking of the particular glamor of drinking; not the act itself, but how, even in sorrow, they’d taken their place as part of a long history of sleepless soldiers commiserating in drafts of summer night wind. Like many great and despairing things, this ritual repeated itself.

When she’d reached for Raiden’s hair, she’d been remembering 1964. _They say gentlemen prefer blondes_ , she’d said to The Boss. It was the first thing The Boss said to her the moment they were able to meet in private: _You dyed your hair._

She didn’t tell The Boss how she was thinking of her when she first dyed it. She had no one to tell when she was pushing 42 years old and showing those same hardened wrinkles, floating between the same real and constructed realms of motherhood. She’d cut her hair short and brushed it back. She focused equally on their similarities and the differences and cried for them both.

She wondered if The Boss had seen in her the same things she saw in Raiden now: the ghostly hands gripping their hearts, history past and yet to be. As a girl, the woman had been foolish and wise enough to demand The Boss’s answers. How much of The Boss’s reluctance, she wondered, had been born of the fear she felt now, looking at her doppelgänger, paralyzing in its familiarity?

“I’ll tell you something I haven’t told anyone in a very long time, Raiden.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m a natural brunette.”

Pause. An auditory turning of gears inside the young boy’s head. “O-oh. Uh…it…it looks nice.”

“You don’t have to pretend like you care,” the woman replies with a laugh. “It’s not an interesting fact. I just wanted to tell you something through it. Will you listen to that, at least?”

“Oh. Ah…sure.”

“It’s probably vain for an old woman like me to bother dying her hair, but my appearance used to be one of my greatest weapons. Doesn’t work so well anymore, but I keep it this way anyway, for my own reasons. When I look in the mirror, I see the old parts of myself that are still worth preserving. Beauty, a sense of vanity, everything they say it means to be a woman--those things were given to me by the men who raised me and taught me how to live.” She leaned her back against the old stone wall, crossing her hands across her waist. “I learned what my body was through their eyes only; physically, emotionally, I became whatever they wanted me to be. And if you have even the slightest awareness of that manipulation, continuing to live with it in silence will rot you from the inside.”

These aren’t things she should be sharing, she thought; she was giving more of herself to this boy than she had to anyone since she was seventeen years old. She was slightly drunk. She was stretching old muscles and laying her bones out to dry, feeling the heat of the forest beneath her. She was putting too much of herself on him, seeing too much in him. She couldn’t even say, beneath the dark veneer of his tired eyes, how much he was listening to what she said, or how much he was comprehending. It was irresponsible and selfish, continuing this cycle that perhaps wanted to be broken. But perhaps The Boss thought the same of her in that northwestern forest, or in the annals of Groznyj Grad, where she had told her tales about the moon.

“In the end, I was one of the lucky ones,” she said with a sigh. “Thanks to an...extraordinary woman I met, I learned what a woman truly was. What my body truly was. The parts of it that were weapons of war were instruments of love as well. Instruments of love and kindness, mercy...in a word, survival.”

She wanted to reach out to him; she wondered what the message means to him without the contact, the flush commiseration. She wouldn’t think of doing to Raiden what The Boss did to her—what they’d done together—but surely there is something to be won through contact.

Maybe that was only true to her in her youth. For some, extending touch of their own free will was far more radical than requesting it.

“Raiden,” she said, looking between his eyes. “Those are the tools we need most to survive in the world we were born into. My beauty may have been defined for me by the world of men, but it is my own now. Now, more than ever, even as it fades day by day with age. Over my life, I’ve cut away other parts of myself that outlived their usefulness...but that part is only for me.”

The world tilted ever so slightly when she closed her eyes. It wasn’t a bad feeling; nostalgic, really. Reminded her of far-off cocktail parties, black suits and feathered dresses. The talk was better sober but the fucking was better drunk, when her weight wasn’t her own anymore. It spread over the mattress, rooted itself in the floor, possessed some river somewhere and suddenly it belonged to everyone but her. There were long, unbearable spells when she wouldn’t speak to another woman for days or weeks. That was when she wanted to spread herself out the most.

Perhaps the two of them were alike even in that aspect, she thought as she felt Raiden’s weight press against her shoulder.

“I’m pretty dizzy right now,” murmured Raiden.

“I know.”

 

* * *

 

 The woman who was once called EVA asks Raiden if she can wash his hair.

She’s already accepted that she might not get a response. She stands above his body, hands heavy with an old metal basin filled with water and a pair of towels rolled under her arm. The rasp of Raiden’s breath filtered through his mechanical throat like radio static fills the old church walls with a sound more foreign to them than gunfire. He doesn’t look at her, but with a deep breath in, he moves upward lays his head at the edge of the mattress.

The woman balances the basin on the stool at the head of Raiden’s bed. Slides a rolled towel under Raiden’s neck. His hair, thankfully, is long enough to mostly reach the water; for the parts near his scalp that don’t reach, she dips a towel into the water and wrings it out over him. White-gold locks curl and undulate on the surface of the water like bands of the Milky Way at twilight. Her old hands pull along their lengths, separating strand from strand, and she finds them sticky, coarse, like they were birthed from the earth itself. His hair was nowhere near this long when they first met, she thinks, but she has seen stranger, more offensive things, and hair can be a sacred thing. It does not grow without reason to.

 _How did we forget his hair,_ she thinks, when she and the doctor first cleaned his sleeping body, scrubbing errant splatters of white blood from his stomach. They had only cleaned the place where they had to do their work. But the Patriots had left this gift--the humanity of his face, his preternaturally lengthened hair. They’d left it as a warning, and she had seen it only as that. It had lacked its own humanity. So now she pulls twigs, leaves from his hair, breaks icicles of hardened sap, fingers shampoo into his scalp and drags it through layer upon layer of white-gold, and when she wrings the rag over his head again to wash it out, a few specks of water assault his eyes and he blinks them away. She sees him blink them away as if they had bothered him, as if he’d been surprised to feel them, as if he had felt such things as _annoyance_ and _surprise._ But she rights herself again; the existence of emotion is never something to be questioned. It is simply to be known.

“All done,” the woman says. Raiden sits upright, and she folds his hair into a towel and pats it dry. “Isn’t that better?”

The hair clings to the metal plates encasing the swells of his back. The woman moves the basin aside and lowers her weight onto the edge of the bed--lightly, gently, testing the boy’s reaction with each inch of descent. Grasping an old comb from the pile of dry towels beside him, she asks if she can brush it out.

Raiden nods.

So she starts from the bottom, from his waist—curious how they maintained that curvature as well, she thinks. Her knuckles brush against the hardness of his body as her hands climb up his spine, over his shoulders. Raiden breathes, full of static, but his chest does not move, and his shoulders do not sigh; this is something his mind and tongue alone remember, and they bid the rest of the body to allow it. It is something he is doing for himself; there’s a safe haven to be found in the repetition of breaths, the cycling of air through an airless body, the stroke of a comb. They have to take care of what is left. And what is left is a body, regardless; she feels guilty, now, remembering how reluctant she had been to call it a body at all. It may have been forced upon him, but it was still _his._ The damage done to it didn’t alter that truth. Even now, his instinct was to breathe humanity into it, to make it his own somehow. Maybe he wants to forget it was ever not his at all.

The comb climbs upward, the woman tugging clinging bits of filth from its strands, shaking them onto the church floor. Her palm smooths the front back, out of his eyes. As her hands caress his skull, the woman who was once called EVA feels Raiden wordlessly lean his weight against her, resting the back of his head against her breast. It’s a child’s show of affection, she thinks, as she watches him blink silently forward. A child mimicking symbols, movements, without any awareness of their meaning. Only purity of intent to show for it.

How tired he must be.

She finds her hand on his cheek, tracing the line where the glass of his jaw melts into organic skin. The skin bears no warmth; its blood, too, has been taken. The white flows through every part of him, metallic or not. “Raiden,” she says. “You know this wasn’t your fault. Please…tell me you know that.”

Raiden is quiet, but for a moment, they breathe together, forms growing and shrinking in the same arc.

Swallowing, she drops her voice to a murmur before she continues. Her hands cross Raiden’s chest as their temples meet. Her eyes follow the idle blips of electricity glowing in tune with his breaths beneath his armor. “Dr. Madnar says you can be rebuilt,” she tells him. “We can save the organic parts of you and make you a more sleek, coherent body. Something better than this...conglomerate. Nothing will happen without your expressed consent, of course. It will be a difficult operation--perhaps even more experimental in nature than what The Patriots did. Dr. Madnar...can’t guarantee your survival.” She cups his shoulders in her hands. “I won’t blame you if you turn it down. You’ve already survived something no one should ever have to endure. But even in this aftermath, you are your own person. What you do with this body from here on out is your decision. Don’t underestimate the power of the parts of it that you choose to save and throw away.”

The woman who was once called EVA rises from her seat at the head of Raiden’s bed. His neck turns to in her direction, ever so slightly, as his eyes trace her form. He is searching for something he doesn’t know, and looking at her in the only way he knows. She watches this and swallows the mass in her throat.

“Raiden...I can never express how sorry I am that you suffered like this. I sent you into the monsters’ den for my own selfish purposes, never thinking of the kind of person you were. I may not have held the knife that severed you from your body, but it was my decree that allowed it to happen. In doing so, I...I failed you very deeply, as a woman. And as a mother. After all these years, and everything I thought I stood for--everything I just told you--I was no better than the men I fled from all my life. I won’t ask for your forgiveness. I can only swear that, with the time I have left, I’ll do better. And I will teach my children to do better. That’s my promise to you.”

When she turns to the portal dividing Raiden’s room from the next, she can still feel his eyes upon her, focused more intently than they have ever been.

 

* * *

 

“All the men here call you their mother.” Raiden shifted his head on the woman’s shoulder. “But none of them are your actual sons. Right?”

“Not biologically, no. They are still my children, but I didn’t make them.” The woman paused, the weight of forty years inside her. Her hands were folded across her lap; she used to sit that way, decades ago, when her stomach had first started to grow. She thought she could protect them if she held them close enough to her. “I did give birth, a long time ago,” she continued. “Three boys. But I never got to raise them; not like I did these boys.”

She didn’t mention the six other children who had died inside her. Didn’t mention how she had given them willingly to the Patriots. Olga Gurlukovich and The Boss would have at least laughed at her, if they wouldn’t have killed her.

Raiden heaved a tired sigh against her, the hint of a slur dragging along the bottoms of his words. “I don’t know much about families, but if you had the chance, I think you would’ve been a great mother to the ones you gave birth to, too.”

With a soft smile, the woman said, “The best of us never get the chance.”

 

* * *

 

 The woman who was once called EVA spends the next several nights in the sanctuary of the church the Paradise Lost Army calls home. In the absence of man, she lights the taper candles one by one and garnishes the altar with Stars of Bethlehem, and the marble Virgin at the head of the room looks down at her as she sits in the frontmost pews. Her immense silence floods the room and coats the petals of the Stars of Bethlehem with sorrow.

The woman had once thought it strange that the church had no crucifix at its head--not even a bare cross to represent the savior through absence. Only that towering icon of the Virgin Mary, the ur-woman, the paradigm of purity and grace built to watch and reflect the lot of them. She’d hated her, once, for the tenets she set for the rest of womankind. The slurs hurled at her by the tongues of men held their roots in the Virgin they compared her to. She’d always preferred Eve; they called her young and foolish, but she’d been the first to surpass God Himself, if only for a moment before He cast her out. Then she’d borne Him sons who taught the world to kill.

A woman bearing both Eve and Mary contradicts herself, and so she is so sorely misunderstood. The woman who was once called EVA thinks of her often when she has visions of the flaming sword--feelings of mistakes made.

She is not a praying woman, but she talks to The Boss.

“Sure wish you were here now,” she mutters in the empty chapel. “Though I’m not sure you’d want to see what the world has come to without you around.”

There are bodies in the church, at work and at play and healing their wounds. The woman who was once called EVA is old. There was a time not long ago when the most change she’d ever seen in a body was her own loosened skin and ochre lesions of age. The burning trees on her hips have turned a distant pink. She feels like she’s had them all her life.

“I don’t know what to do for him. I always thought I would. But this is something not even I could anticipate. Every step I take, I fear I’m making another mistake. I’ve made so many already. And I’m running out of time to make them right.”

The Virgin doesn’t answer; the paintings on the walls don’t answer. A child on watch opens and closes the church door, and a summer’s wind blows through, fluttering the candles and carrying their smoke high into the old rafters.

“This could kill him,” she says.

She thinks of 1964. She is watching The Boss on the brink of sleep. She asks her if she is afraid to die.

She is quiet for a moment. The girl who was then called EVA wonders if she has fallen asleep. But quietly, she whispers to her, “It’s easier when someone is waiting for you.”

In the sanctuary, Raiden is waiting for her. He stands amidst the Stars of Bethlehem, long blond hair wrapping his shoulders, ankles trembling in the candlelight; he’s re-learning the feeling of weight on his feet. With heavy strides, he walks toward the woman and sits beside her in the pew. They look up at the Virgin together.

“Does it feel good to stand?” she asks.

Raiden nods. His breath heaves and statics.

“Mama...I’m afraid to die,” he says.

The woman folds her hands together and thinks of what to say to the boy called lightning--what to say to a boy with so much left in life even as all his life is contained in a mound of flesh atop a crooked frame. He is rising from dark water to walk upon the land again.

He is not like her; he will not be Eve or Judith, known for the blood of men he spills from within the mythology of his body. He is not like The Boss, walking willingly to the grave. He is greater than the both of them.

“It’s not your time, Raiden,” she tells him. “When it is your time, I’ll be waiting for you. I promise.”

Like Mary, the boy does not reply. He uncurls the fist atop his thigh to reveal a pair of silver scissors. He presses them into the woman’s palm and turns his back to her. Although he cannot see her, she knows his eyes lay on her. She knows this as she threads her fingers through the scissors’ grip. She begins to cut.

The boy called Raiden closes his eyes. Big Mama watches.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! Thanks once again to AO3 user Quitebrilliantindeed for her encouragement, beta reading, and inspiration.


End file.
